MOSCOW (Reuters) – The Russian Defense Ministry said on Monday that 63 soldiers were killed in a Ukrainian shelling of a school they used to live in near the town of Makiivka in the part of Ukraine’s occupied Donetsk region. by Russia.
The temporary barracks was targeted by six surface-to-surface missiles fired by a US-made Himars (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System), two of which were shot down, the ministry said.
Multiple Russian sources have been talking since Sunday on social networks about this bombardment on New Year’s Eve, which according to them caused between several dozen and several hundred deaths.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense mentioned a death toll of 400 soldiers.
The school requisitioned by the Russian army was completely blown up by the bombardment due, according to several Russian and pro-Russian sources, to the presence of explosives stored in the basement of the building.
According to Russian military blogger Rybar, who has more than a million Telegram subscribers, some 600 soldiers were present at the school when it was totally destroyed. About 100 wounded were extracted from the rubble, he added.
A source close to the authorities installed by Moscow at the head of the Donetsk region told Reuters that the soldiers killed were among the 300,000 men recently mobilized on orders from the Kremlin.
Former pro-Russian separatist leader Igor Girkin, increasingly critical of Russian military failures in Ukraine, spoke on Telegram of “hundreds of dead and injured” in the strike alone.
(Written by Reuters, French version Tangi Salaün, editing by Sophie Louet and Kate Entringer)
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